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To give some balance, we do that too as computer people. The question "what is a computer" has increasingly refined and sometimes contradictory answers.

To the layperson, it's a box that can run software and probably had blinking lights, and that's good enough. Ask an engineer, they'll talk about RAM and CPUs. Ask computer scientists, and they'll talk about Turing completeness. Or even say something seemingly contradictory to an outsider, like "computer science isn't about computers". And even among experts, you'll get disagreements for things like "is a calculator a computer? An FPGA? An abacus?"